Daily Score Blog

British Columbians have one more thing to be thankful for this holiday. September employment figures for British Columbia are in and the news is good.  BC employment increased in September by 31,000 jobs with the unemployment rate dropping 0.3 percent to 8.4 percent. This is the first monthly decline in unemployment since the collapse of the global economy last fall.

Manufacturing businesses hired 5,900 people and the construction industry, especially hard hit by the recession, created 4,000 new jobs.

My cries have been answered.

In Canada, at least, there is such a thing as a free market think tank with a free market perspective on parking policy. The Winnipeg-based Frontier Centre for Public Policy recently published a concise little position paper, "How Free Is Your Parking?" by Stuart Donovan.

It makes three points, briefly:

I remember the first time I drove into Vancouver in the late 1980s. Interstate 5 melted away into Highway 99 and eventually, I crossed over the Oak Street Bridge into a four lane city street with no turn lanes. How odd that the freeway didn’t just plow through the city with convenient exits at strategic points. What were they thinking?

Instead, it was a game of trying to pick the right lane and making the lights until we finally arrived in downtown Vancouver. Well, this was no oversight, as former Vancouver City councilmember and Sightline board member Gordon Price outlined in the Great Debate over the summer. Vancouver shunned freeways and, according to Price and others, that resistance to the freeway slicing through the heart of the city forms a core of the Vancouver’s well deserved reputation for being sustainable.

I had not realized, until reading Sara Mirk’s brilliant history of Portland’s dead freeways, that Portland can boast a similar history of resisting freeways. In her Portland Mercury article, Mirk highlights Portland’s Dead Freeway Society, a bike group that rides and remembers this chapter in the city’s formation.

A report released last year from the Livable Seattle Movement declared that Seattle’s existing zoning is more than enough—three times more—than we need to accommodate expected growth. Phew! What a relief. And here we thought the Seattle region would have to undergo some painful, politically-rending rezones in order to sop up all the new people—as many as 106,000 households—arriving in the next decade. And, by extension, it would also mean we don’t need the backyard cottages being proposed by the City of Seattle.

But does this conclusion pass the “red face” test? Nope—faces are red. Or at least they should be. Why? Because their data is suspect and it doesn’t take into account any kind of community objections or other unforeseen obstacles even when the existing code allows development.

There are many reasons to love Vancouver, BC. It is a great international city with tremendous cultural diversity. Some of us truly see Vancouver as a bold leader in accommodating growth in sustainable compact communities. Personally, I like the fact that the Queen is on their money and they call the Mayor, “Your Worship.”

Now there is one more reason to admire Vancouver—especially all you density devotees out there: secondary suites in apartments. Here is how a backgrounder on  recent legislation passed by the Vancouver City Council in July describes them: 

Similar to secondary suites in single-family homes, the secondary suite in apartment buildings is a self-contained dwelling unit (with a kitchenette, bathroom, and living room/bedroom area) designed within a larger primary suite. The secondary suite is able to be ‘locked-off’ from the primary suite and a separate door is provided for the secondary suite to either a corridor or to the outside. Together the secondary suite and the primary unit would be approximately equal in size to a two-bedroom/two-bathroom apartment.

All of the kids returning to school this week brings to mind those classic school essays along the lines of "What I did this summer" and "What does democracy mean to me?" Should the kiddies be confronted with a new twist on the latter -- "What will climate change mean to me?" -- they'll find help from a new tool released recently by The Nature Conservancy, the University of Washington, and the University of Southern Mississippi.

Climate Wizard provides predicted temperatures and rainfall worldwide for 2050 and 2100 based on best-, medium-, and worst-case scenarios of carbon dioxide emissions and global warming (the non-US data is only available for 2050 at present). You can zoom in for a closer look on regions and states you're most interested in. 

Last week I wrote about the strange way we measure poverty in the United States. Canada doesn’t have a defined poverty level but instead uses a Low Income Cut Off or LICO. The LICO is a level of income below which a family ends up spending more of its income on necessities than an average family of the same size (this is a good rundown of poverty measures in Canada). 

The history of measuring poverty in the United States is not one that has inspired a great deal of confidence. There is a sense from advocates working on poverty issues that people above the established level are still poor, while others worry that setting the bar too high would incentivize poverty. Housing affordability measures have a similar story. A new way of looking at housing affordability called the residual income approach is one that offers a real alternative to the current method.

As we wait for Congress to resume work on climate change and energy legislation, psychologists and sociologists are trying to figure out how to inspire action at the local and individual levels.

An article in a recent issue of Nature helps explain why Seattle is a leader in fighting global warming, despite the fact that from a strictly "rational-choice perspective" doing so provides little real benefit to the city.  (Those benefits apparently didn't include reelection -- a fact that  soon-to-be-former Mayor Greg Nickels probably regrets.)

Researchers at Colorado State University wanted to know if there was "a mathematical logic behind an area's response to climate change." They chose 150 US localities (county governments, metro areas, or agglomerations) and examined three factors:

• Risk level from climate change (temp change over past 100 years, proximity to the coast, history of hurricanes, floods, or droughts)
• Amount of greenhouse gas emissions being released
  
• Political bent (R or D)
  

Here's what they found.

You can review some of the design contest entries here. For the most part these ideas are at the edge of feasibility, but that’s the point of design competitions: to push the limits of what conventional wisdom says is possible.

Last week I heaped praise on Portland’s plans to revise their city building codes to encourage family-friendly courtyard housing.

This week, I am feeling the same way about another set of changes being considered that would make it easier to generate clean energy and reduce runoff in urban neighborhoods. A package of changes called the “Green Bundle” is being reviewed this summer by the City of Portland. The Planning Commission will have a hearing on the proposed changes on August 25. 

Among many other nifty urban clean energy ideas like solar panels and green roofs, the Bundle would “allow small-scale wind energy systems to exceed Zoning Code height limits, either as stand-alone towers or when incorporated into building architecture.”

The most common sense of the word “density” in land-use terms is simple: more people in a smaller area. Frequently the only way to accomplish this is to build taller, multi-unit buildings. High rises.

But in areas with low concentrations of people, increasing density can mean something different than building up to the sky. There are ways to create more diversity and choice in single-family neighborhoods—accessory dwelling units (ADUs) can mean mother-in-law apartments, garages converted into detached housing, or rooms for rent. All of these are good growth strategies for cities, providing families and property owners with more options, and maintaining the character of some single family neighborhoods. 

There is a lot going on in the region when it comes to increasing choices in single-family neighborhoods. Vancouver, Portland and Seattle are all looking at ways to accommodate more people, while keeping established neighborhoods intact. Each city has a different name and a different game plan to legalize ADU options that have been shut out by city codes, but in all, density is on the rise—and not the high rise.

President Obama recently signed into law what’s called “cash for clunkers” legislation intended to take gas guzzlers off the road by offering an incentive for owners to upgrade to newer, more efficient cars. This is a really great idea because the program incentivizes the right thing: fuel efficiency. But the legislation has been criticized as more of a support for the ailing auto industry than an energy efficiency program.

In any case, when compared to the Scrap It program in British Columbia, part of the Canadian government’s Retire Your Ride program, the US effort—the Car Allowance Rebate System [CARS]—pales.  

We’ve looked at how dense urban areas compare with sprawling areas in terms of per capita emissions and we’ve also looked at whether Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) and gas consumption is higher in areas that sprawl than in compact areas. In both cases studies have shown what we might suspect: areas that sprawl have more climate changing emissions, bigger and less efficient vehicles.

Now how about energy use? Do compact residential communities use less energy than areas that sprawl? A study recently published in Housing Debate takes a comprehensive look at residential energy use in compact areas compared with those that sprawl.  The conclusions, again, are what we might have suspected all along. Land use policy is tantamount to energy policy. The study is worth a closer look to dig into some of the reasons this is true.

Peter Steinbrueck former Seattle city councilmember and Sightline board member Gordon Price got together for a lively debate last night in Seattle’s downtown library. The question: whose home town was the greatest city – Seattle or Vancouver, BC.  The premise, however, was that each advocate had to argue for the other guy’s hometown. 

Steinbrueck launched his argument noting the fact that Vancouver had accessible and safe bathrooms in public places. Seattle has had a struggle with this issue and just recently scrubbed an effort to put more pay toilets in high traffic areas. It’s a great point. How can a city be vibrant if people are concerned about what they are going to do if one of them has to “go,” especially families with children?

The BC Sustainable Energy Association, “a non-profit association of citizens, professionals and practitioners, committed to promoting sustainable energy in British Columbia,” has produced an analysis of the split incentive problem in British Columbia and a proposal to fix the problem through its Green Landlords Project. (Split incentives happen when owners of multi-unit housing have no interest in energy improvements because they don’t pay the energy bills and tenants don’t have an interest improvements because they don’t own the property).

The Project’s report starts off on the right path by quantifying the impacts of energy inefficiencies in rental housing. Rental housing makes up a third of BC’s housing and produces about 1.4 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year. It is also the slice of the housing sector that provides housing for low and middle-income households where energy costs make up more than 10 percent of total household income.

The report acknowledges what we discussed in earlier posts; most efficiency programs are targeting single family homes to the exclusion of multi-unit rental homes where there are huge potential savings for the lowest income families.

What will solve this problem?